Part 9

"What they don't know will never hurt them. A man is no better off because he knows things!" She had heard that so often; and no girl is spending eight hours a day for two years with other girls without soaking in something of what they believe--not and be human, that is.

But she had never met a man like Peter. He held her in such respect, he held all girls in such respect, that it was solemn. Only the night before she had thought one time he was going to kiss her, and she had surged toward him, with her lips soft for him, but he had only said "Good night" suddenly and had run off--almost--up the street.

But Peter was speaking.

"Men have to go out to fight for a living in places where the fighting, Sarah, is sometimes pretty fierce. And sometimes that kind o' fighting makes 'em rough, and maybe cruel in spots. But that don't mean they're bad men. Men c'n be rough sometimes, but I never knew a man--that was any good, Sarah--that wanted women to have any o' men's badness. Aboard a vessel we just nacherally expect every man in her will 'tend to his part o' the work, even if he loses his life sometimes 'tendin' to it. That's a man's part, an' it's what he owes to the other men aboard. An' every man has that, an' it's as much a part of him as the beard on his face. And so when there's a woman somewhere a man's countin' on, he expects just nacherally she'll hold out against all the world for him. That's her part. And when to-night, Sarah, that fat-faced, lyin' brute said you'd drunk wine with him, 'twas just as much as if you'd said you liked him once--liked his kind."

Sarah sat down on the step. Pretty soon--she couldn't help it--Peter heard her sobbing.

He lifted her up.

"Sarah, Sarah; what is it?"

She drew away from him; for, of course, when she told him, he, that was so good himself, would never care for her again.

"It was true what he said, Peter! I did drink wine with him, and in that same place!"

Peter stood very still. And then he moved out to the curbstone, and with little tugs at his collar kept looking up at the sky. By and by he came back to the doorway.

"I wish you hadn't, Sarah; I wish you hadn't," he said, but came no nearer.

"Wish I hadn't told you?"

"No, no; I'm glad you told me. And I know what it meant for you to tell me. I'd rather take a chance going over the side--redjacks, oilskins, and all--in a high sea after a shipmate than have to tell a girl something about myself that I know she don't want to hear. Specially when I care for her--not that I'm thinkin' you care for me so much, Sarah."

The blood came back to Sarah's heart. She hurried to tell him the rest.

"I've been wanting to tell you, Peter; you mustn't think me worse than I am. He used to come down to my counter and talk to me; and after a few days of that he asked me to go out with him. I was a little proud at first--to be noticed by the manager above the other girls. Girls like to be made much of, Peter; if it's only by a lost dog that licks their hand, they like it. I went to that place with him, after he'd asked me a dozen times, and the third time there with him I drank a glass of champagne. I wanted to know for myself what it tasted like. But I never took it with him again--nor went out with him again, because coming home in the taxi that night he tried to get fresh. A lot of men, Peter, think that if a girl isn't cold and stiff in her ways she must be bad. And I kicked the door of the taxi open and left him and came home alone."

"I'm glad you told me that. And Sarah?"

"Yes, Peter?"

"Good night, Sarah."

"You're not mad with me any more, Peter?"

"I could never stay mad with you."

"Then you must tell me you're not, Peter. A girl wants to be told these things."

Her eyes were smiling up like stars through the dark of the doorway at him. He drew back her head to him and kissed her. She lay very still against him. He patted her head.

"You'll marry me, won't you, Sarah, some day?"

"I'll ask mother. And whenever she says--will that do, Peter?"

Late every winter Mrs. Pentle took a month's trip South. She had returned from that trip South and was making the rounds of the store. She came to the shipping-room, looked round, asked Flaxley a few questions about things; and then, as she was about to go:

"I don't see Captain Crudden. He is not sick?"

"Peter's gone, ma'am," said Flaxley. "Mr. Henston and Peter had words, ma'am, and Peter put on his coat and walked out."

"What!"

"Yes'm. But before he put on his coat he threw Mr. Henston into the passageway. Then he went and got married," he added.

"Peter married!"

"Yes, ma'am. He surprised us, too--that is, gettin' married so quick."

"Whom did he marry?"

"Miss Hern, from the notions counter."

"Hern? Notions? Oh--I remember her now."

Flaxley saw her cross the passageway to the rest-room and sit down on a couch. After a time she went up-stairs.

It was after two o'clock--Flaxley remembered the time very well--when Mrs. Pentle left the rest-room; so she must have ordered her car and gone to Gloucester right away, for she was in Duncan's store, according to the minutes of Fred Lichens, the old bookkeeper, before four o'clock.

"Is Captain Crudden here?" was her first question.

"He is. He's down the wharf--ready to sail in your vessel," said Mr. Duncan. "Shall I call him up?"

"Please do."

Mr. Duncan hailed from the steps of the store, and Peter came; but no smiling shipper's helper who looked like a boy was this Peter.

He was smiling enough, but there was already the hint in the set jaws, the wary, far-looking eyes of the master mariner, the ocean battler. Her confidence ebbed; she was in an atmosphere of men's work that she could never get away from in Duncan's store, and almost timidly she heard herself asking:

"Will you tell me, Captain Crudden, what was wrong with the work in the store? I thought you liked it."

"Nothing wrong, Mrs. Pentle."

"Then what, please?"

"M-m-m." Peter revolved his cloth cap on one finger but said nothing.

"One day in the shipping-room, Captain Crudden, you told me what a comfort it was for a man to be home--of the joy of the easy slippers and the warm fire, of children climbing all over you--of the warm bed every night."

"That's right; I did."

"No more danger, no more hardship, your sure pay every week!"

"I know; I know."

"Then why? Was it the work?"

"The work?" Peter clearly smiled now.

"Haddockin' in South Channel, Mrs. Pentle, workin' fourteen tubs--eight thousand hooks to a dory a day, an' dressin' our deckload o' fish on top o' that--three, four, yes an' five days an' nights runnin' sometimes, with no lookin' at our bunks till we filled her up--! Work? I cal'late I've done more work in South Channel fishin' many a day than in any ten days I ever saw in your store, Mrs. Pentle."

"Then why, please, Captain Crudden, why?"

"Why? When you went South, Mrs. Pentle, you left a man in your place to give orders."

"Mr. Henston? What of him?"

"Him!" Peter looked down at his cap, twirled it on a finger, looked at Mrs. Pentle, and then: "Him! Honest, Mrs. Pentle, if we had him out on the fishin'-grounds we wouldn't cut him up for bait!"

Peter went back to his vessel and Mrs. Pentle to her car.

"I ordered my house opened to-day. I'll run over there," she told Mr. Duncan.

It was a clear day with a fresh breeze from the west. She must have seen, when she looked, the whitecaps in the harbor as her car rolled over the road.

John Ferguson, up in his lookout, saw her car roll up to her gate. John could also see the reflection of the fresh fire in the grate in her den, the fresh pot of tea beside the window-seat. And no doubt she could see, as she sipped her tea, John Ferguson through an air-port of his aerie.

However, the _Celia Pentle_ was sailing out to sea and John was entering her--_Celia Pentle_, Peter Crudden, Master, with the date, in his book--and was reading the entry over to himself when Mrs. Pentle came in.

The harbor had grown whiter under the little crests of the tossing seas, and outside the point they were rolling yet higher and higher.

"Isn't it rough weather to be sailing, John?" she asked.

"Rough? For an able fisherman and an able master and crew? No, Mrs. Pentle. The wind's fair, ma'am, as a man'd want for a run offshore--a great chance for Peter to try the new vessel out. This time to-morrow, ma'am, and if you could listen to Peter I'll bet you'd be proud to have such a wonderful vessel named after you. A new, able vessel and a new, lovely young wife--he oughter be the happy man sailin' to sea this night."

"But his wife--won't she be lonesome, John?"

"For her own good and Peter's, I cert'nly hope so, ma'am. But she won't be lonesome for too long, ma'am. Their age--an' healthy an' lovin'--they're the kind, ma'am, to have a houseful o' children. An' that'll be a good thing. Many's the day an' night, out on the wide ocean there, Peter'll be drivin' his vessel, thinkin' o' them children an' the mother to home, an' plannin' how he's ever goin' to kill fish enough to pay for the shoes an' their clothes an' their schoolin' an' the house rent, an' all the rest of it. Many a hard night out to sea he'll be thinkin' o' that, an' it'll be that'll hold him to his work an' make a full man o' him. And the mother she'll be keepin' the home, lovin' the children an' lovin' Peter that's workin' night an' day to keep 'em. I tell you, ma'am, they're the wise ones that lay their courses so that by 'n' by, whether they will or no, they got to go on with the steady drivin'."

"Look at her now, ma'am, down to the rail already an' whalin' away through it! An' there's Peter--look at him--in the oilskins up by the wind'ard bitt! An'-- But there's some one callin' you, ma'am."

It was her maid, who came running over to say that there was an urgent telephone message.

"It is from Mr. Henston, madam."

Mrs. Pentle nodded that she heard, but continued to look through the glasses at the _Celia_ sailing out to sea.

The maid coughed. She was at the foot of the tower, looking up.

"He says, madam, that the silk-buyer wishes him to go to New York for that stock of pongees, and that he is waiting for an answer to his letter before he goes."

Mrs. Pentle stood at the hatch of the tower, looking down.

"Fishermen are pretty careful of what they use for bait, aren't they, John?"

John, after consideration, said:

"Bank fishermen are maybe more careful than most, ma'am; though, when we was hard put to it, I've seen some pretty poor quality o' stuff cut up for bait."

Mrs. Pentle looked down the ladder to the maid.

"Tell Mr. Henston there is no answer. Tell him to go to New York and that, hereafter, he had better stay there and look after the silks exclusively."

For as long as the falling darkness would allow, John saw Mrs. Pentle picking out the plunging course of Peter's vessel through the green-white waters. And then, turning to him, she said:

"I've been thinking that I ought to take more interest in my young girls when they marry. On the day the Cruddens have a baby born to them I shall make over the _Celia Pentle_ to the baby."

For all she smiled when she said that--and in John's opinion she should 'a' been a happy woman to be able to say things like that--for all that there was what John called a melancholy in her voice and a sort of vapor in her eyes when she said it; and, looking after her making her lonesome way over to the big house with all the lighted windows, he couldn't help thinking that for all they said she was such a boss of a woman--for all that--there ought to be somebody more than a lot of butlers and maids and cooks to meet her at the door.

There is the story of Peter's stop ashore, as old man Flaxley, John Ferguson, and Fred Lichens know it. Fred had to add that he couldn't see where Peter's stop ashore ever hurt him any.

"Certainly," said Fred, "since the baby came, he has been making fishing history in the _Celia_!" He looked over to Mr. Duncan when he said that.

Mr. Duncan wasn't deaf.

"A little stop ashore never harmed anybody," retorted Mr. Duncan--"it's the stopping ashore too long!"

The Sea-Birds

It was fine summer weather, and John asked me how about a swordfishing trip for a change. I said all right, and we got a chance in the _Henriette_, and went down that same morning to Duncan's Wharf to go aboard.

The _Henriette_ lay ready to go to sea, and John and I stood on the string-piece and looked down on her deck and up at her mastheads. A lumper hanging around Duncan's was standing near us.

I never knew a dock lumper that couldn't tell you all about everything. "She is weak-built and pretty deep--I don't like to see them so deep," said this lumper. "And down by the head, too."

"Maybe you'd be deep if you were on'y thirteen tons net register an' thirty tons of ice in you," said John.

And a proper answer. A man should always have a good word--even if he don't more than half believe it himself--for the craft he's going to sea in. At the same time I was thinking that I was having an eye to a new, able fresh-halibuter--a big ninety-ton vessel--across the slip.

I like the big fellows to go to sea in. I said so to John.

"A big, able brute--yes, boy. But that big brute--Lard Gard, she'd look sweet, wouldn't she, chasin' swordfish in the shoal water south o' Georges. She's a good little boat, the _Henriette_--and a pretty name," said John.

It was a fresh southwesterly, and a day to make a man over, as we passed on by Eastern Point. Just to look at the young blue seas was life, and the soft salt air was a cure for whatever blue feeling a man might have had hooked into himself ashore.

A great morning. We passed two big salt fishermen bound in. From the Western Banks they were, or from Flemish Cap, half across the ocean, maybe; and the brown rocks of Cape Ann must have looked to them like mother's johnny-cake on the kitchen table that sunny morning. Swinging by like a pair of twins they went, flying both topsails the pair of them, but neither of them much more than flushing their scuppers to the fine fresh breeze. Whoo-o-sh! fifteen hundred miles we've come from the east'ard! In the name o' heaven--we could almost hear them saying it--don't stop us!

The sea was more than swishing through the little _Henriette's_ scuppers. Our rail was good and wet as we belted across the bay, and rounding Cape Cod we rolled down till the solid water began to fill her lee gangway; rolled lower and lower, 'till it was solid between her lee rail and house; and those of us on her wind'ard quarter had our feet braced so we wouldn't take a slide down her high-slanting deck and overboard.

Our skipper was a driver. By and by we were rolling low enough for a buoy keg to go floating off our house and overboard astern. A fine half-barrel of a buoy keg it was--black and white painted, smooth and tight as a drum; a beauty of a buoy which by and by, at the end of a fifty-fathom warp, ought by rights to be towing after a fat swordfish; and so the skipper said. But now she was dancing atop of the swirling seas astern, and the skipper, looking astern after it and then at us, also said: "To hell with it now! Buy a new one out your share--and next time some o' you'll learn to lash 'em, maybe!"

It was a day to see pictures. From astern of us came bowling up one of the biggest and stiffest knockabouts sailing out o' Gloucester. She had a bow like a bulldog's jaw; and she sent that bow smashing through the white-collared seas as if she had come out for no more than to give her ugly face a wash. Stiff? She was a church on a rock.

"There's the able lady!" said Shorty. "No water sloshin' solid through her lee gangway an' washin' buoy kegs off her house--hah, John?"

John was a Newfoundlander. He told me that the earliest thing he remembered was helping bait his father's trawls on a Grand Banks fisherman.

With his arms folded over the corner of the house, his chin resting on his arms, and his eyes like two razor-edges peering out between his eyelids, there wasn't much happening up to wind'ard--or leeward either--that John wasn't seeing. And it was a great day to see things; for it was a gale o' wind blowing, the sky was still clear blue, and the air was the kind to make a man over.

A quick-acting, quick-talking, wiry little fellow was John. Big Bill couldn't keep up with him at all. Bill's right name was not Bill. Nobody knew what it was; nor cared. Bill was probably a better name, anyway. One peek at him as the big fellow hove himself aboard was enough for John. "Will ye look at Big Bill!" cried John; after that no other name would fit him. "Lard, Lard," said John, "but I be wantin' to see the look o' that bulk of a man when he jams hisself into a bosun's chair to the masthead!"

Bill never could see anything funny in John's line of talk, and said so across the supper-table that same afternoon. Breakfast was at four o'clock, dinner at half-past nine, and supper at three o'clock on the _Henriette_. "Somebody'll come along and set on you right hard some day," said Bill. To which John said: "So long's 'tisn't some one o' your tonnage does the settin', I callate I c'n stand it," and then, reaching over and scooping to himself another wedge of blueberry pie: "You cert'nly do make great blueberry pie, cook."

"Not so ferry bad," said the cook.

He was a good cook, who had followed the sea since he was fifteen. The big ports of the world--he knew them all, and when he wasn't too busy he would talk about them; though what he most liked to talk about was his blueberry patch in Stoneport, where he owned a nice little white house with a simment cellar--up on the hill next the isinglass factory. He had a dog at home, a part of him Skitch and the other part of him Sin Bernard. Gardner, the milkman, owned the Bernard. Who owned the collie he didn't know. Nobody knowed. And when those smart Alecks of Stoneport kids came along and tried to bemboozle those blueberry-bushes where they was hangin' in bunches as on a grapewine, why that dog-- Well, he was the cleffer dog, that was all.

He had brought a few of the blueberries aboard, he said; which we very well knew--two bushels of them charged to the ship's stores at current market rates. His blueberry pies were all right; but the blueberry stews! With dumplings! There was a cook sailed out of Homburg on a barque when our cook was a cabin-boy on her, and that dumpling receipt was got out of him one night in Yokohama when the old fellow had a couple of bowls of saki into him. Saki and rice, yes. Which was how it came about that thirty-four years later we were getting dumplings noon and night with our blueberry stew aboard the _Henriette_. John, after maybe five hours to the masthead, would come sliding cheerily down to deck at dinner call. At the head of the forec's'le companionway he would haul up and have half a peek below. And then a sniff. A long sniff, and then a full peek. "Lard Gard, dumplin's!" John would say, and look sadly around and up at sea and sky.

But so as not to hurt the cook's feelings, John, when he sat down, would take the big fork and go sounding in the blueberry stew, and soon, bright blue and beautiful, he would gaff a half-dozen of them onto his plate. And the cook, noticing it, would smile and say: "You like tem tumplings, Chon?" And John would say: "This side o' Fortune Bay I never saw nothin' to ekal 'em." And when the cook would turn his back, John would slip them into his pocket.

After dinner John would take the dumplings aloft, and, when Big Bill would take the skipper's place out at the end of the bowsprit, John would heave the dumplings at him from the masthead. Sometimes he would heave a few astern at whoever happened to have the wheel. Generally it was Oliver at the wheel, because his eyesight was not so sharp as the others of us for seeing fish from aloft.

Oliver was the first spectacled fisherman that John had ever seen; and one day when Oliver laid his glasses down, John took them up, and set them on his own nose and picked up a newspaper. And quickly removed them. "Lard, Lard, a swordfish she'd look like a whale in them and his sword as long's a vessel's bowsprit!"

When Oliver was not to the wheel, Steve would be there. Steve was a tall fellow. To give an idea of how tall he was, John would run down the deck, leap into the air and give a grab at the sky. "Where me hand touched would maybe reach to his waist," John would say. Steve, when he turned in, had to let his feet hang over his bunkboard and onto the locker; and when he did that John came and sat on them. Steve slept in the cabin under the overhang. Big Bill slept under the overhang, too, in the opposite bunk. One of our pleasures was to watch Bill kick his way into his bunk under the low overhang, then to tell him the skipper wanted to see him on deck, and watch him wiggle his way out. Feet first he had to come. Steve could do it all right, but Bill--he weighed three hundred.

On foggy nights Bill turned in on the locker, with one arm and leg stretched out to keep him from rolling onto the floor. He had once been in a steamer collision, and he warn't of any notion to be sent to the bottom by no steamer collision--leastways not if he saw her comin'. And he callated to see her comin'. His last word to the next on watch on a foggy night was always: "Call me soon's you see any steamer lights. An' don't wait to diskiver if it be a pote or stabbid light." On watch in a fog Bill never got farther away from the fog-horn than he could make in two leaps; and he was no Olympic leaper.

With Bill and Steve in the cabin slept Oliver and the skipper. Most sword-fishermen carry an auxiliary engine to hustle after the fish in calm summer weather. The rest of us bunked in the forec's'le. She was a little creature, the _Henriette_, and it was pretty close sleeping for'ard on a hot night. To abate the heat nights, we rigged up a wind-sail which came down the air-port forward of the foremast; which was all right till the vessel tacked. When she did, her jumbo-boom would sweep across the deck and swipe our wind-sail over the rail. When we fellows bunking forward talked of how hot it was for'ard, the cabin gang would only say: "Hot? You want to come aft and soak in the gas off the engine for a few nights!"

We cruised four days off Block Island without seeing a sword-fin. Plenty of big sharks were loafing under the surface there, but sharks don't bring anything on the market. We stood easterly. Off Nantucket light-ship we picked up Bob Johnson of Nantucket and Bill Jackson of Maine, Bill Rice and Tom O'Brien of Gloucester, the _Master_ and the _Norma_ also of Gloucester, a Boston schooner, the _Alarm_, and a big, black brute of a sloop which nobody could name. Tom Haile was there, too--in the _Esther Ray_.

No fish in sight that afternoon; but even so the skipper took his station in the pulpit. John, Shorty, and I went aloft. John was topmost, and swung in his chair just under the truck. Shorty and I were just under John. When we got tired of swinging in our chairs we could stand up, one cross-line in the small of our backs, another against our chests, and balance ourselves. When the vessel dove we could wrap our arms around the topmast and hang on. There was a swell on this morning--no crested seas, but a long, smooth, black swell, enough to send the vessel's bowsprit under every little while; and sometimes to send the pulpit atop of the bowsprit under, too.

"But this skipper--he don't mind gettin' wet," explained Shorty. "I've seen him go divin' till it was over his head in the pulpit an' he still hangin' on waitin' for fish."